Leaves of Grass Quotes

Daisy Kincaid: What's your aversion to proper grammar?

Brady Kincaid: Rhythm maybe.

Bill Kincaid: I was born just a few minutes before my brother, Brady. He lived life on his own terms, indifferent to fear - either his own, or those of others. And, let's be honest, by any normal measure my brother was a criminal and a colossal fuckup.

[laughter]

Bill Kincaid: But, in the years that we were together, when we were growing up, he gave me the happiest freest times that I will ever know. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that. I left Little Dixie because of my own fears. My greatest regret is that I never told him how difficult that really was.

Bolger: Do you believe in a higher power?

Brady Kincaid: Yea, I do. I do. It's the only way to make sense of all this. Otherwise, it's just pure fucking chaos.

Bolger: Like where we is created by him and he judges what we do?

Brady Kincaid: Well, I think it's more like... like parallel lines.

Bolger: Parallel lines?

Brady Kincaid: You know, like two lines go on and on forever and don't ever touch?

Bolger: Yea.

Brady Kincaid: 'Cept, they don't actually exist in nature. And man can't create true parallel. It's just more of a concept... Well that concept, that perfection, we know it exists and we think about it, but we can't ever get there ourselves. I think that right there is God.

Brady Kincaid: [talking about Janet] She's a poet.

Bill Kincaid: What?

Brady Kincaid: Seriously. She writes fuckin' poetry. And she's the Ladies Noodling Champion of '05.

Bill Kincaid: Her?

Brady Kincaid: 125 pounds of catfish in under 10 hours with nothing but her bare hands.

[sigh]

Brady Kincaid: I tried to get her and Colleen in a three-way once, but wouldn't neither of 'em go for it.

Janet: You still leaving tomorrow.

Bill Kincaid: I think so.

Janet: I'll miss you.

Bill Kincaid: And we barely know each other.

Janet: "You have not known what you are. You have slumbered upon yourself all your life. Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time. What you have done returns already in mockeries. The mockeries are not you. Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk."

Bill Kincaid: [absorbing what she'd just quoted] Who was that?

Janet: Walt Whitman.

Bill Kincaid: I don't think I ever imagined hearing him recited to me by a girl gutting a 40 pound catfish.

Janet: That's exactly how he should be recited. He wrote without rhyme or meter. Free verse. Just whatever he felt inside coming out in one intricate rhythm. Pure unashamed passion, without definable restriction.

Bill Kincaid: I'm sorry, see, I have a few issues with that.

Janet: Why?

Bill Kincaid: Because some have dared to suggest that even poetry has rules.

Janet: Or you make your own.

Bill Kincaid: Right there, that's the part I never bought into.

Janet: Because?

Bill Kincaid: If everybody runs around making their own rules, how can you ever find what's true? There's nothing... there's nothing to rely on.

Janet: "One night, I split my cicada skin, devoured your leaves, knowing no poison, no law of nourishment in that larval blindness, a hunger finally true."

Bill Kincaid: Who's that?

Janet: That's me.